Jared Bernstein

Jared Bernstein is an economist and senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. He was formerly chief economist to Vice President Joe Biden and a member of President Barack Obama’s economics team.

Recent Articles

Ron Sachs/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images The Speaker of the United States House Paul Ryan speaks at the Capitol as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell looks on at right trickle-downers.jpg T he Republicans’ disdain for America has been laid bare by their tax plan. Progressives must take advantage of this moment. As you surely know, the versions of the bill passed by the House and Senate are beyond terrible, and they just gets worse with each cover-of-night iteration. Simply put, they accomplish four goals, which I outline below. The evidence behind these assertions is overwhelming and has been made repeatedly, so rather than repeat it, I’ll provide links to the facts. But if facts were actually in play, we wouldn’t still be arguing about the offsetting growth effects of trickle-down economics, and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell wouldn’t be blithely asserting that the growth effects will more than pay for the revenues lost by this plan...

(Photo by: Hendrik Schmidt/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images) A robotic welding system for Volkswagon car body shells is featured at the Industrial Museum in Chemnitz, Germany. T he inadequate quantity and quality of American jobs is one of the most fundamental economic challenges we face. It’s not the only challenge: Poverty, inequality, and stagnant mobility loom large, as well. But in a nation like ours, where wages and salaries are key to the living standards of working-age households, all these challenges flow from the labor market problem. OK, but this is a supposed to be an article about technology. What’s the linkage between technology and this fundamental problem? As a D.C.-based economist who’s been working on the issue of jobs and earnings for almost 25 years, trust me when I tell you that most policy makers believe the following: “Yes, there’s a problem of job quantity and quality, but it’s largely a skills problem. Because of recent technological advances, most notably...

AP Photo/Kin Cheung Here’s a piece of good news of which you might not be aware: The U.S. safety net performed a lot better than you thought during the recent downturn, which was the deepest since the Depression. Thanks to expansions to the Child Tax Credit, the Earned Income Tax Credit, food stamps, and unemployment insurance—all beefed up by the $840 billion Recovery Act—the safety net almost wholly mitigated the rise in child poverty. Even middle-income households saw most of their income losses substantially offset by tax and transfer policies that sharply ramped up to help them. That’s the good news. The bad news is that most of the Recovery Act’s outlays have now been spent, and pressure to reduce deficits leaves other spending on children and families under assault. While the safety net performed well during the worst phase of the downturn, other trends have been troubling. Families lost trillions of dollars in home equity, the largest source of wealth for working- and middle-...